RIP Star Wars Insider

Here's some unfortunate news from the world of Star Wars fandom: the long-running magazine Star Wars Insider is shutting down after a decades-long run.

I'm sad to see it. As a younger science fiction and Star Wars fan growing up in Vermont, there were only a couple of ways to keep up to date on those communities. While hubs TheForce.net's Jedi Council Forums were huge for me, another was a couple of magazine subscriptions that helped shape my fandom: Asimov's Science Fiction and Star Wars Insider.

I eagerly awaited copies of Insider when they arrived, digging into the short stories that often came in each issue, but also the articles and behind-the-scenes look at the ongoing Prequel Trilogy, and the eventual successor projects. Over the years, my subscriptions would lapse, but I often pick up copies when I see them on magazine racks at my local Barnes & Noble.

But more than that, Insider helped show that there was a much larger fan community out there. While I was constantly online on the TFN forums, I was often sequestered away in the books section. The magazine showed off a far more vibrant world of fans who were dressing up, making their own art, writing letters, meeting up, and so forth. It's where I first learned about a group called the 501st Legion – pictures of the group's members popped up every now and again, and that knowledge eventually steered me toward inviting the group to a band concert in my senior year, something that ultimately led to my joining the group later that year.

This was an era of movie making where the production wasn't quite so paranoid about spoilers – I remember an official webcam streaming the production as it happened (I think?) and where magazines such as this provided some real news and behind-the-scenes glimpses of the films while they were in production. They provided fans with interviews conducted with a whole range of people involved in the franchise, from actors to authors to crew to artists, to short stories, photos, profiles, and quite a bit more.

Looking back, I think that the magazine was also instrumental in my own career as a writer. I never wrote for it, although it was always a sort of bucket-list item (and I got sort of close at one point), but it sort of demonstrated that there were people out there writing about this thing that I loved. When I started writing for fan-run sites like The Unofficial Clone Wars Site, I was pouring through back issues to check out the articles and stories for new glimpses of that particular era of the franchise, and that early work blogging would lead me to a career doing the same thing.

The magazine has bounced around a bit: I remember a period around the summer of 2000 (Issue #50 came in July, then there was a break until #51 in January 2001) where its future was uncertain following Sir Alec Guiness's death (although looking back, I suspect that had more to do with switching publishers.) The magazine went from Wizards of the Coast to Paizo Publishing to IDG Entertainment before finally landing at Titan Magazines in 2007.

I still have all of my copies: they've been neatly boxed up and stored in my basement. I pull them out more often than I'd ever expected to: sometimes to track down an obscure story or bit of background on something to do with the franchise while writing an article such as this. There's something nice about being able to do that, given how easy it is for something written for Starwars.com to fall off the website.

In its announcement, Lucasfilm notes that the magazine will come to an end with issue #237, and editor Christopher Cooper notes that the world of magazine publishing has immensely changed since Insider was first published. That's a bit of an understatement.

Fandom's desire for every little update about the franchise hasn't changed much over the magazine's decades-long run, but the environment has certainly changed. When I first started subscribing, there were only a handful of sites dedicated to the franchise, in addition to TOS – The Official Site. Now, there's a plethora of not just fan sites (TFN is still hanging in there), but YouTube channels, social media pages, and even trade publications, which breathlessly publish every rumor and hint of a rumor that rears its head.

While I haven't been a dedicated subscriber to the magazine (and thus am part of the problem), I do miss that slower era of news, where it didn't feel all consuming. In a lot of ways, the magazine's closure feels a bit like an end of that time – one that we're not likely to see again.